Store: Morrisons Oxted
Store manager: Phil Myers
Opened: 1996
Size: 25,000 sq ft
Market share: 32.69%
Population: 88,156
Grocery spend: £2,518,525.83
Spend by household: £70.05
Competitors: 18
Nearest rivals: Aldi 6.6 miles, Asda 10.0 miles, Co-op 0.2 miles, Iceland 5.9 miles, Lidl 4.4 miles, M&S 5.3 miles, Morrisons 3.6 miles, Sainsbury’s 0.2 miles, Tesco 4.1 miles, Waitrose 0.2 miles
Source: CACI. For more info visit www.caci.co.uk/contact. Notes: Shopper profiling is measured using Grocery Acorn shopper segmentation. Store catchment data (market share, population, expenditure, spend by household, competition) is within a five-mile radius.
For CACI’s shopper segmentation of the other stores we visited this week see the online report at www.thegrocer.co.uk/stores/the-grocer-33
What has been your career trajectory at Morrisons? I’ve worked at the company for 27 years now. I started as a checkout colleague back when I was 16 in my local shop. I’ve worked my way up through many positions, and I’ve been a store manager for the last 15 years. I was actually in the Oxted store as a store manager three years ago, then I went off to another store and I came back at the beginning of November last year. They’d just finished a massive refit, which has changed the layout across the shop and we’ve got new café in place, which the customers have really taken to.
Could you tell us a bit about Morrisons Oxted? The area is quite affluent. The shop itself is quite key to the community –there aren’t very many shops around of this size, so we get a lot of people that use us as their regular store. We have a customer base of very regular shoppers here. The staff are really friendly. I have a really strong management team and there’s always lots of hellos and good mornings from customers. We see the same people coming in day in, day out.
Could you tell us about the new wave of price cuts? How do you think they will be received? In the current climate where cost of living is affecting everybody, I think everybody will be over the moon that prices are being cut across the store with the 1,000 price locks that we’ve put in place from this Monday. We’re getting some really good customer feedback on the prices that we’ve dropped across the store on some key lines that people buy every day.
Are you doing anything for Dry January? Our range of alcohol-free lines has increased massively over the last couple of months and we were able to open up sections with the refit to be able to offer more of those products. We’re getting some really big success there. As we come out of Christmas, you can tell what’s failing and what’s not. And the alcohol-free sections are definitely something people are looking at more.
What are you proud of this year? We’ve done such a massive job with our community. We do a grab bag for a local food bank and we’ve been growing that since the beginning of the pandemic. We started with three food banks that we were supporting: it’s now grown to seven and we’ve also got three community fridges, which are run by local churches. Mike, my community champion, does an absolutely fantastic job keeping the grab bags going and the Oxted store is one of the highest on grab bag donations from customers. We are one of the best out of 500-ish stores. Another of our successes was the way we planned and executed Christmas: we were very, very busy but we were all guns blazing, and we got some really good feedback. Everybody got what they wanted, everybody got through the checkout. That was really positive.
What are your plans over the next year? We’ve run an Amazon operation during the year and that has really taken off. A customer can go online and order Morrisons products through Amazon and then that’s delivered via Amazon drivers. It’s given our customers a different avenue to shop with us. Over the next year we’d be looking to grow that offer, because that’s another avenue our customers want.
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